If you'd been listening to the armchair pundits before the match, you'd have been forgiven for thinking that Chelsea were the underdogs in this game. The whole lot of the wankers were saying that, due to Terry Fucking Venables' coaching genius, we had no chance of winning, Portsmouth would "have the answer" to Zola, pushing 3 men up against Chelsea's 3 central defenders would cause problems, etc etc. Yawn.
Portsmouth DID have the answer to Zola, and it was "Oh shit...".

I don't think I've ever seen Chelsea win a match so easily. Poor old Grodas was actually seen to be yawning at one point during the first half !

Portsmouth started off promisingly enough, or, more accurately, Chelsea didn't start off that well, and it looked for a few minutes as if we were in for a torrid time of it. Portsmouth were giving Chelsea no time on the ball, causing them to hurry their passing, which made it difficult to get the flow going. The problem for Portsmouth was that they had nobody who could provide their forwards, so Chelsea didn't have to worry about defending too much, thus giving them time to sort their shit out.
Which they did. By the time 15 minutes had passed, Portsmouth were already looking bereft of ideas as to how to get past Chelsea's defence, and Chelsea's passing was starting to look slick. The writing was on the wall for Portsmouth, and it said: "you're going to get a good pasting". Chelsea were running the show, passing all over the place, looking good. The only minor irritation was that Leboeuf's long diagonal balls from the back were missing their intended target more often than not, wasting possession.

There was a minor heart-stopping moment when Zola beat the offside trap that Portsmouth had until then successfully used to keep the boys at bay, only to have his chip blocked by the keeper, an excellent save. Suddenly, it clicked. Leboeuf hit the ball long, with the outside of his boot, sending Hughes steaming down the right. A perfect ball, Hughes didn't even have to control it, he just hit it on the volley from around 20 yards, straight across Portsmouth's keeper into the far side of the net. To be fair, not many keepers would have saved that, it was a Hughes trademark thunderbolt.

After that, Chelsea were on top of the game completely, it seemed only a matter of time before we scored again, with Zola scraping the bar with a shot, and Frankie Sinclair stabbing the ball with his studs instead of stroking it over the line with nobody to beat (!!)

Nightmarishly, a thick mist chose this time to start oozing over the top of the stand, causing palpitations in case the ref tried to abandon the match, but it was never thick enough for that. It was eventually traced to a bloke in a Sou'Wester on the beach who'd set fire to his beard with his pipe, and all was well again.

Just before half time, Hughes was brought down for the umpteenth time, finally getting a free kick just outside the area. Christ knows what the ref was up to, the Portsmouth defenders had been queueing up to kick lumps out of Hughes for most of the first half, and when they realised that they could get away with it they just hammered him some more. When are refs going to give him some protection ?

Any road up, everyone waited for Zola to curl it round the wall into the top corner, but the surprise was that Clarkey had turned up on the blind side, so Zola chipped a perfect ball onto his head, which the keeper could only parry. The ball was spinning into the net anyway, but just as Clarkey followed up to make sure, Den pushed him out of the way and tapped it in. I couldn't believe it, neither could Clarkey, but it didn't matter, everyone went mental.

The second half started just as promisingly, with Bob just failing to curl the ball round the keeper from 20 yards. A few minutes later, a clanging error by Andy Awful gave the ball away to Chelsea, who wasted no time breaking with Hughes and Di Matteo. Eventually Franco Zola calmly slotted the ball under the keeper's body. A lovely move, 3-0.

It was only when Portsmouth brought on a skinhead in attack that they looked like troubling Chelsea at all, he was quite lively, sorry I can't remember his name. At any rate, Portsmouth finally beat our offside trap down the left, the bloke cut the ball back to the skinhead, who crashed it left-footed past Grodas, who was asleep at the time.

Really annoying that Chelsea didn't keep a clean sheet, but they made up for it by scoring what I thought was the best goal of the match, another break from Chelsea, with Den overcooking a pass to Hughes on his right, Hughes magnificently passing the ball back to Den, who controlled the ball brilliantly with one foot, sweeping the ball into the net with the other. 4-1, and thank your Mother for the rabbits.

VERDICT:
A crushing victory by any standards, nice to see the boys doing the business against a team from a lower division for a change. And up yours, Andy Bloody Gray.

See you at Wembley.